Palestinian artist Dima Srouji teaches at the Royal College of Art, just completed a fellowship at the Victoria & Albert Museum, is the founder of Hollow Forms and has exhibits on in Jeddah, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi. She invited Esquire Middle East into her practice.
ESQ&A
You have such a rich and varied practice, it’s hard to know where to start. How do you introduce yourself when someone asks what you do at a party?
I really enjoy saying architect, but then the follow up is usually “what kind of architecture are you specialized in, retail or residential?” I trap myself into a longer conversation almost always. The follow up also really depends on the party. In this case I would follow up with “architecture isn’t really always concerned with the building scale. A lot of my work is research based and the outcome is sometimes an installation or a sculpture, I like to sit where the boundaries merge.” I’m really just looking for stories about space that need to be told, and told differently, then choosing multiple ways of unfolding them.
You’re currently in three shows across the Gulf – in Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and Jeddah. How do the works in these three locations interact with one another, if at all?
All of the work uses objects to tell and retell stories from Palestine. These objects, whether they’re windows, perfume bottles, apricots, bathtubs, bus tickets, all have within them an embedded memory. Remaking the artefacts allows us time and space to imagine what the language is within the material. What the thing is trying to say. They all are objects of the ground, which is what ties all my work together.
You recently completed a Fellowship at the V&A in London. As someone who teaches at RCA and exhibits regularly and has a design practice and is generally quite busy what did that space give you that those other things don’t?
It gave me pause, new material to look at, and some new paths to wander through. I went in initially interested in looking at glass vessels from the region, but left with so many new ideas. This was not only because of the overwhelming amount of objects and options that I was exposed to within the museum collection, but most importantly because of the access to knowledge that the curators and conservators had. It will require a few years of work to see what the actual outcome of the fellowship really looks like.
I feel like a lot of your work has an almost artefact-feel to it. Like it was always there and discovered. Is that where your focus on working with archaeologists and anthropologists come from?
I always had dreams about Jerusalem as if I were looking at the city from the bottom looking up, crawling through its belly. I think there is something archaeological about our childhood experiences too, not just the physical strata that you discover walking through our stone carved cities, but occupying the underground as a site of shelter as well.
I want to know a bit more about Hollow Forms, what led you to start it and is there a reason why you specifically chose to work with glass?
This was an accident. I was returning to Palestine after many years of living abroad and began working with Riwaq, an NGO that preserves and renovates historic villages. While I was working with them in one of the villages I met the glassblowers from there. They have a shop in their home where they used to make beakers for Birzeit University’s chemistry lab. I was impressed by the technical skills and immediately started working with them on their first ever design collaboration.
What’s next?
I have a few shows coming, the first is on Zaha’s legacy which will be curated by Maite Bojrabad at the Cincinnati CCA -Zaha’s building. I’m also really looking forward to working on two solos in the next two years. One in New York and the other in Dubai. I’d like time now to build the studio in London and take time to revisit the last few projects. This moment feels like an inflection point in my practice where things are moving in really exciting new directions.